Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969)

Finding a Camera and a New Career

New York Times
Friday, November 19, 1999
By Vicki Goldberg

Photographic history is chock-full of people who were painters
before they became photographers, but very few were in women's
wear to begin with. Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969), a name to
conjure with in fashion photography, worked in the garment
trade, later owned a leather goods shop and was also an artist
before he became a photographer. The camera must have come as
something of a relief, for Blumenfeld had a ripe talent for
photography, a minor one for painting and none whatsoever for
handbags.

He opened his shop in Amsterdam after World War I and
immediately did so badly at the business game that desperation
drove him into the arms of art. In "Eye to I" (Thames and Hudson),
an autobiography laced with anger, irony, sex and puns
(Blumenfeld recounts being squeezed at birth through the
Bearing Straits), he wrote that he painted because he couldn't
draw.

Then he found a camera and a darkroom that the previous tenant
had left in his store, and as his business went down the drain
persuaded a few women who came in to let him make portraits of
them (and occasionally nudes) instead. New portraits went into
his shop window each morning among the crocodile extravagances,
and lo, a photographer was born.

All three of his professions are on view in New York right now,
some in rather more detail than others. "Erwin Blumenfeld:
Collages 1916-1934," at the Ubu Gallery, presents 40 collages,
most of them done in Amsterdam and several of them on the
letterhead (or with the logo) of the Fox Leather Company, his
leather goods enterprise. The James Danziger Gallery's "Erwin
Blumenfeld: Nudes" has a small selection, 15 to be exact, of
his photographs of female nudes, a subject that preoccupied
him. For the full variety of Blumenfeld's nudes, there is "The
Naked and the Veiled: The Photographic Nudes of Erwin
Blumenfeld" (Thames and Hudson), by Yorick Blumenfeld, the
photographer's son.

Collage was devised by inventive and adventurous artists who
already had their artistic bona fides, but as a relatively easy
technique it went on to rescue a few who had no great facility
for drawing and painting. Photography, come to think of it, has
done the same, and both media assisted Erwin Blumenfeld, a self-
styled Sunday painter, to reach the more respectable days of
the week.

Several of his collages were drawn in a style that refers to
German Expressionism, with added photographic elements, as
in "Cat Woman," a shambling drawing of a distorted nude whose
head is a photograph of a snarling cat with roughly painted
hair. Others proceed from a rapid and rather clever, cartoonish
drawing style and sometimes make visual puns, as "Smokers" does
with a pen-and-ink cigarette spouting photographic smoke that
actually comes from a distant factory.

More pointed is a 1921 drawing of Charlie Chaplin, positioned
as if crucified, with the Star of David in the sky and the
word "religion" written in red. Chaplin was a symbol of the
persecuted Jew to more than one German artist, and Blumenfeld
himself had experienced virulent anti-Semitism in Germany.
Blumenfeld never made high claims for his collages, but some of
them are charming or historically interesting, and a couple of
montages have real impact.

He grew up in Berlin and knew the Berlin Dadaists. Dada was
meant to be a knockout blow against the establishment, the
bourgeoisie and the rational order that had sent millions of
young men to the slaughter in World War I. Blumenfeld already
nurtured a vivid animus for the bourgeois ideals of his
parents, and his stint as an ambulance driver during the war
gave him a lasting respect for irrationality. He elected
himself co-president of the Amsterdam branch of Dada, the other
president being the only other member.

For his very first photograph, at the age of 10, he had
assembled a still ife that would have done a collagist, or a
Dadaist, proud, with Michelangelo's Moses holding a half-peeled
potato and a toothbrush in his lap and Blumenfeld's brother
resting his lead on an upturned chamber pot, 'wearing," as the
photographer reported, "Mama's pince-nez and Pa-Pa's mustache-
trainer, and clutching Vlama's rolled-up corset in his fist."

Collage was frequently pressed into the service of politics in
Germany; in the Netherlands, Blumenfeld attacked Hitler with a
few high-potency montages. (A montage superimposes photographic
negatives during printing; a collage is cut and pasted.) In
1936 he printed an image of a half-draped classical torso opped
by a beady-eyed calf's head and called it "The Dictator."

He was even more direct with double- or triple-printed images
of the Fuhrer's face combined with a skull; three variants are
at Ubu. One version with a jagged hole for a nose, one blank
eye socket and a gaping line of teeth was exhibited in Paris in
1937 but had to be withdrawn because the German Ambassador was
so incensed by it. The Germans got to see it anyway. The United
States Air Force dropped millions of copies of this photograph
over German cities in 1943.

In 1936, when the handbags had finally emptied his wallet,
Blumenfeld moved to Paris in hopes of becoming a fashion
photographer and earning a pretty penny. In 1937 and 1938 some
of his photographs, including some nudes, were published in the
first two issues of Verve, the art magazine that was itself a
work of art, and in 1938 his fashion career began at Vogue.

Blumenfeld had begun photographing nudes in Amsterdam. In
Paris, and for the rest of his life, he fully indulged his
desire to acclaim "the eternal feminine ... the fetishes of my
life: eyes, hair, breasts, mouth." He was as obsessed with the
nude as Edward Weston, but he came out of a European
experimental tradition and subjected the body to an astonishing
number of photographic tricks. Perhaps the simplest of these
became the best known, a nude under wet silk, which illustrates
his boyhood discovery that Botticelli and Cranach had rendered
their nudes even more naked by covering them with transparent
veils.

Even the small selection at Danziger makes clear that
Blumenfeld's photographic setups were composed with infinite
care. He positioned a model's head to look as if it were
attached to the neck of a stone torso. He arranged a pattern of
shadows that striped a body almost into invisibility. He posed
a woman lying on her side, facing the bottom of the frame, and
photographed her from above so she looked as if she were
falling through the air.

In the arrangements and then again in the darkroom, he went to
such lengths that it can be almost impossible to tell how the
picture was made, and the contrivance occasionally overshadows
the subject. Still, he was a wizard. What appears to be the
shadow of a model's profiled torso is actually her left breast
and rib cage; lighting and perhaps photographic development
have flattened and darkened this part of her body.

He photographed a nude through a perforated screen. He
frequently solarized his prints, turning on a light during
development to create tone reversals and dark outlines. He
treated an elegant, Ingresesque nude back this way, then
exhibited the negative as well; it is even lovelier and
certainly more ghostly.

Blumenfeld spent two years in French concentration camps during
World War II before being released and managing to get to the
United States. He was convinced that his photographs were art,
and the artistic and experimental component in his work earned
him a hugely successful career as a fashion photographer; in
1950 the failed leather goods man was said to be the highest-
paid photographer in the world. So in the end, Erwin Blumenfeld
put all three of his careers together - women's wear, art and
photography.